The rapid diffusion of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) access and the increasing demand for WLAN coverage is driving the installation of a very large number of Access Points (AP). Though the cost of APs is traditionally not very high, the deployment of APs often involves connecting the AP through a wired connection (traditionally Ethernet), and this introduces complexity and high costs for deployment in certain locations.
The concept of a wireless meshed network of APs or other wireless nodes is being developed. The nodes within one meshed network may in some cases operate at the same frequency. This means that for such systems, in contrast to commonly deployed WLAN systems today, several APs in such meshed network may transmit their beacon messages in the same channel. This may result in the collision of beacon messages and can be very inefficient, since in the currently deployed WLAN standards (such as IEEE 802.11b) no contention resolution is provided for beacon messages. Rather, each AP may transmit its beacon message after an Inter-frame Space (IFS) since the previous data transmission has ended. In such case, a beacon collision from the two APs will very likely result.